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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26826421">At The Bottom of Everything</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/pipistrelle/pseuds/pipistrelle'>pipistrelle</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>The People's Tomb Discord Fic Jam 2020 [4]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Blood, Cuddling &amp; Snuggling, Descriptions of Injury, Discord: The People's Tomb (Locked Tomb Trilogy), Fluff and Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Near-death Experiences, Necromantic Grad School AU, Sharing a Bed, The People's Tomb Fic Jam: First, Trauma</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 10:56:22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,887</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26826421</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/pipistrelle/pseuds/pipistrelle</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The first snow of the season gives Camilla bad dreams.</p><p>A piece in my Necromantic Grad School modern AU.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Camilla Hect &amp; Palamedes Sextus</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>The People's Tomb Discord Fic Jam 2020 [4]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1941952</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>104</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>At The Bottom of Everything</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Thanks to Jo on the discord server for convincing us all that Cam and Pal definitely share a bed.</p><p>Notes on the setting:</p><p>This takes place in the same universe as my other modern AU fic, "The Meaning of the Word", though it's not necessary to have read that one first. This is a modern setting + necromancy, where the cast are grad students at Canaan University pursuing a Lyctoral degree, which requires necromancers to apply with a designated cavalier who advances through the program with them. </p><p>This fic expands on Cam and Pal's backstory in this world: they grew up on an Antarctic necromantic research station called Base Six, where their parents were involved in a project studying ice cores, looking for thanergy from pre-historic mass extinction events. In this AU they aren't cousins.</p><p>More info on the world in general can be found in the end notes of "The Meaning of the Word".</p><p>This fic is for the People's Tomb Discord fic jam prompt "first". Title from the Bright Eyes song of the same name. It's a little different from my usual stuff in some ways, and in other ways (cuddling) it is exactly the same. Hope you enjoy it!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Cam woke all at once, skin prickling with cold sweat and heart hammering in her throat, one hand already on the hilt under her pillow. She sat up, looked for the threat that had woken her, saw only familiar things: the skeletal silhouette of her necromancer's desk against the far wall. The piles of books that seemed to multiply of their own accord, pale and fulminant, like mushrooms sprouting where something had died. The fold of the heavy curtains. The light from the hallway that made a little sodium-yellow stain on the gray carpet, uncrossed by any strange step or shadow. </p><p>Beside her Palamedes grumbled and stretched like a lawn chair unfolding, all struts and angles. "Cam," he groaned, half questioning, half complaining. Hearing her ragged breathing instead of an answer, he woke up the rest of the way and said in a soft alert voice, "Wards are intact. No movement. What’s wrong?"</p><p>"Nothing," she said at last. The disturbance had been inside her, not outside. She was starting to remember bright pieces of the dream, hard and cold. Shards of ice. God, what an inescapable cliché. "It's fine. Go back to sleep."</p><p>In a calmer tone he said, "Pull the other one."</p><p>She pinched him, not hard, on the outside of his arm. He laughed a little, wrapped his long fingers around her wrist and held it loosely, a fragile anchor. "What is it? Bad dream?"</p><p>Lying to him would be a fool's gambit, and he wouldn’t stop asking a question that interested him, not until he got an answer. She exhaled in an attempt to bring down her heart rate. "The crevasse."</p><p>"Ah.” He wasn’t laughing anymore. Quietly, mostly to himself, he said, “First snow of the season. Should have thought of that.”</p><p>The year's first real winter storm had blown in that morning, a few weeks earlier than anyone had expected it. He’d been buried deep in his books since before sunrise and hadn’t even glanced out the window, but Cam had gone out for a practice bout with Tern (who she'd very satisfyingly thrashed), and then to get coffee and takeout, since he'd forgotten that food existed. Palamedes had looked up in mild wonder when she came in with slush on her boots and white flecks in her hair like she’d aged forty years in a few hours.</p><p>Now he was looking at her with a furrow in his brow that meant he was frustrated with himself, annoyed at the manifestation of some problem he felt he could have prevented. Which was ridiculous. She prodded at the wrinkle in his forehead with the pad of her thumb until it smoothed out. “And if you had thought of it, what would you have done, exactly?” </p><p>“This.” He pulled her hand to his chest, rested it just left of the promontory of his sternum, between the fourth and fifth rib. "I'm right here. Thanks to you."</p><p>"It was just a dream," she said, but she didn't take her hand away. His heart kicked under her palm, even muffled beneath the cotton of the ancient tattered <em> Trivia Champion! </em> T-shirt he'd worn to bed. Strong and steady, despite the things he always said about necromancers having poor cardiac function. Strong and steady as it hadn't been, back then or in the dream. As she'd been afraid it never would be again.</p><p>----</p><p>The whole thing had been entirely his idea. He'd convinced himself that a radar blip a few kilometers west of the base had been caused by a colony of <em> Aptenodytes forsteri</em>, and since he'd been writing a paper trying to increase their environmental protection status, he'd set his heart on going to look. Petitions for Admin to authorize a trip had been denied. There were no drilling sites or buoys out that way; winter was coming fast and no one wanted to waste resources on unnecessary expeditions; and although Palamedes was recognized as a necromantic prodigy, he was only twelve, and not funded by any grant committee. So he'd had no choice but to go himself. And so of course Cam had gone with him.</p><p>At the time it had seemed perfectly reasonable. They both knew how to drive the little powered sledges that the base personnel mostly used for short-range travel. Weather reports were good. Palamedes packed a ludicrous array of necromantic gadgets, including a crude thalergetic scanner he'd invented that he said needed a field test. Camilla packed safety gear and rations, and made sure Palamedes was wearing enough layers, knowing from experience that he would wander out into the Antarctic wastes in barely anything more than his ordinary shirt and trousers if he was sufficiently distracted. They'd combined their treat rations to bribe the only other kid on the base, a seventeen-year-old mechanic's apprentice, to cover for them.</p><p>They'd set off confidently expecting to cover a few miles of icy emptiness, photograph some penguins using various photoreceptive and thalergetic filters, and be back with some actionable data before anyone knew they were gone. Then the storm blew in. Later they found out that it had been a surprise squall off the coast. All they knew then was the way it turned the flat white world to a hell of visual static.</p><p>In Cam's dream it always happened very slowly, though she knew that in reality it must have been an abrupt and shattering crash. Dreaming, she first became aware that she had lost sight of him; which was impossible, because they were crammed together on the seat of the sledge, and because she <em> never </em> lost sight of him. But suddenly she was alone. Then the crevasse opened up in front of her, a howling white mouth leading down into a glittering blue throat, the mouth of the glacier with its ice-rimed teeth, and she was falling into it. But that wasn't what scared her. She knew she survived the fall. What scared her was the certain conviction that Palamedes had already fallen, was somewhere down there caught and mangled on those teeth, and she wouldn't be able to reach him in time --</p><p>They'd been found about eighty minutes after the crash, once the sledge had come up missing and the mechanic's apprentice got nervous and broke her vow of silence. Her act of treachery had saved their lives. When help arrived they'd found Camilla clinging grimly to consciousness, her right arm broken in three places, her left hand a mangled mess. She'd been huddled with Palamedes inside a blood ward, the most basic form of heat-trap, drawn in Camilla's blood. She'd been renewing it from a fresh cut every fifteen minutes, as near as she could judge. He'd told her to do that. She'd explained it all quite coherently to the medics who pulled first him and then her out of the crevasse. She'd told them how she'd found him at the bottom of that shallow crack in the ice, how he'd been barely awake, just enough to trace the ward and tell her how to keep it going, and then he'd passed out, and she couldn't feel his heartbeat or see him breathing, but he wasn't dead, because his ward hadn't collapsed. She'd told them that over and over, that she couldn't feel his heart, but he wasn't dead, the ward was intact, he wasn't dead, he couldn't be dead.</p><p>He wasn't dead. By some miracle, he'd suffered multiple fractures on top of moderate hypothermia and lived. By an even greater miracle, he'd escaped without permanent damage to body or brain. From the moment he'd woken up, he'd been insistent on correcting people that it wasn't a miracle that had saved him; it was Camilla.</p><p>Everyone had started calling her his cavalier then, including him. She hadn't even really known what a cavalier was or what it meant to be one. By the time she found out, it had seemed the most natural thing imaginable. She'd been twelve, raised in a steel bubble at the bottom of the world full of research necromancers and ice cores, far from the sort of romantic novels and period-piece movies that featured the brave, stalwart defender eternally devoted to the fragile necromancer dabbling in supernatural forces. It was just as well; she didn’t have a romantic bone in her body, and he was twiggy but not particularly fragile.</p><p>The closest thing to a cavalier on Base Six had been a meterologist, one of the few non-necromancers on the project, whose father had been sworn swordsman to a famous Finnish necromancer Camilla had never heard of. After her arm healed up, the meteorologist started using the Base gym as a practice floor to teach Camilla the rapier, although they'd had to have one flown in specially with the next supply drop.</p><p>She’d loved it. She'd taken to the study of the blade like a polar bear cub to seal-murder. The next year she'd started training with the twin swords at Palamedes' suggestion. And everyone had started calling her Base Six's cavalier primary, the same way they called Palamedes <em> Warden</em>, as an affectionate joke that wasn't really a joke, not deep down.</p><p>It was the first time she'd saved his life, but not the last. She'd always protected him, just as he’d always taken care of her, and she had never seen the need to think much about it. The cav/necro movies turned out to be uniformly maudlin and terrible, almost nothing like their actual lives, so she ignored them. He told her that the novels were even worse. </p><p>They'd taken the official oath when he turned eighteen because Canaan University's Lyctor program required the documentation, but it had been an exercise in belaboring the obvious. Camilla and Palamedes were what they were, and they had never needed an embossed piece of parchment or someone else's overwrought words to prove it. </p><p>----</p><p>And nine years after she'd won that first bout with death, here he was. Heartbeat strong and steady, depthless gray eyes clear and calm, hand warm over hers. Cam still had a few small scars on her left wrist where she'd cut through the skin to keep that ward going. They were nearly invisible, but he knew their coordinates in relation to muscle and bone and he moved his thumb from one to another in some sequence meaningful only to him, as though sending a coded message. </p><p>"Better?" he asked.</p><p>"I'm fine," she said, and this time it was the truth. She felt rather than saw him smile as he let go of her hand. She ruffled his hair, amazed as always at how unruly it could get despite being so short. “It was all my fault for letting you drive.”</p><p>“A highly uncharacteristic error, never to be repeated,” he agreed. </p><p>She was fine. It was an old scar, and they’d been through worse since. She would face the blank white snow-shrouded world tomorrow without flinching, and stand steady against the chill edge of the wind. But when she settled down again, she let him sling an arm across her waist and press his forehead to the back of her neck, and she wrapped her fingers around his bony wrist.</p><p>His pulse chased the last memory of deadly cold from the marrow of her bones, and when she fell asleep again she dreamed about ordinary things.</p>
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